Debut novelist Anjali Joseph definitely has "it"; that capacity for acute, measured observation that makes a writer a writer. However, what she needs is a tale more enjoyable in the telling than that of the underwhelming Saraswati Park. Mohan is a dreamy letter-writer whose post outside Mumbai's General Post Office offers him opportunities for timid observation and attempted writerly reflection. Thwarted, like so many of the city's residents in their larger ambitions, he is slow to realise that this sense of failure has spread to his marriage. For, his diffident wife Lakshmi has tired of the containment of his snail-like routine and inability to engage with their placid, outwardly content middle-class life. Into this quiescent mix comes their 19-year-old nephew Ashish, who has been placed under their watch as his parents have been posted elsewhere and he has to repeat his final year at college. The source of his insufficient attendance, we soon discover, is an uncertain friendship with Sunder, a rich friend who soon turns to dour lover; Ashish is a gay boy afflicted with a sort of early ennui that at times provokes empathy and at other times annoys in its failing to take off into anything more substantial. Sunder soon breaks things off and is succeeded by Narayan, a predatorial tutor who is to teach Ashish about French films and the failings of life, love, etc. But there is no real climax; nothing really happens, and at some point we stop caring.

While the book is readable, we are almost surprisingly bored. Saraswati Park, an unglamorous Mumbai neighbourhood prone to wear and tear, is the mostly uninspiring backdrop to this taciturn recounting of familial frustration and compromise. The plot and playing out of the narrative lacks balance, as does the importance placed on key characters. We lose Lakshmi after the beginning of the book, when we no longer get to see inside her head-perhaps a crucial loss, as Mohan later bemoans when he has a contrived, belated epiphany about how he has kept her quiet, like Shelley did his first wife Harriet. Also, Mohan is overshadowed (but not very powerfully) by a confused Ashish. Most importantly, the central conflict is confused so that Lakshmi's leaving to care for a sick relative turns her relationship with her husband into a minor subplot, even when it somehow succeeds in resuscitating their quietly floundering marriage. Also, Narayan's abandonment of Ashish is predictable and there is no fun even in the telling of the affair's kindling and waning.

Perhaps what irks, throughout, is the overbearing sense that we are laughing at the characters (as in at and not with), a quality common to writing about "other" classes that taints parts of the narrative; Mohan and his wife have grown apart, so "had it been, he wondered darkly, the television?" Moreover, in the midst of the carefully registered banality, false notes like an awkward Dawson's Creek reference jar. Most jarring-an odd episode where the neighbour Mrs Gogate pays a visit and seems to be about to molest or otherwise traumatise Ashish, which is never resolved or referred to again.

What Joseph does best is describe small moments of urban calm elegantly. With an appreciation for Mumbai's potential for the beatific, she fills each scene in capably. Hers is the miniaturist's eye, and she shows a sophisticated understanding of what makes people tick; "Every year when the rains came it was like returning to a well-known place after a long journey." You can almost forgive her descriptions of eyes "innocent of intelligence" and other such affected phrases. Yet, for all the clever readability of the prose, there is not even a flash of brilliance, and that, in this time of average reads, is what the reader yearns-and must hold out-for.

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